Boy Scout Troop Website Hosting
Boy Scout Troop Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the internet for other servers located in their data center, called colocation, also known as Housing in Latin America or France.
History
Up till 1991, the internet was restricted to use only "...for research and education in the sciences and engineering..." and was used for email, telnet, FTP and USENET traffic, but only a small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to do this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site will have a more comprehensive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for sites that wish to keep the data transmitted more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for different reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered by web host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host could also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally referred to as a "headless" server. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce, blogs, etc.).
Reliability and Uptime
The availability of a site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly available and reachable via the internet. This differs from measuring the uptime of a system. Uptime refers to the system itself being online. Uptime does not take into account being able to reach it when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often not included in the SLA timeframe and needs to be subtracted from the Total Time when availability is calculated. Depending on the wording of an SLA, if the availability of a system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers provide uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. a lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, internet security is an extreme issue. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major item when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.